51–60 of 221 posts
The first general purpose, programmable computer was designed in 1945 to calculate artillery firing tables for the US Army and was immediately used to help design nuclear weapons. Computers and all technology has always been, and will always be, used as a weapon (either directly or indirectly).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps your vantage point from industry is in fact myopic. We all have our own biases.
Completely fair - but at least my PoV comes from having actually worked as a SWE, you know? I feel like the best understanding this fellow can have is purely secondhand from watching the success / failures of his students. I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice…
Will LLMs in their current ergonomics have staying power? Perhaps. Nobody can predict the future. But I don’t think it’s a given in the least
Ever consider there's reasons to study Computer Science at the collegiate level, other than making yourself a more desirable worker?
There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…
> Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better. my uk mechanical engineering bachelors degree had a required module on the ethics of engineering which has always stuck in the back of my mind. i think we went over the bhopal disaster as a case study one week, although it was abou…
'We should teach our Students what Industry doesn’t want', Kevin Ryan, https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3377814.3381719
'Are you sure your software will not kill anyone?', Nancy Leveson, https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/136281.2
There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…
>I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose.
>I do not and will not use the internet, in any form, for any purpose.
There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…
I think it is a great shame that we live in a modern world where we do we must to survive regardless of how it makes us feel. I suspect it is the root of much suffering.
"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose. Although LLMs are fascinating from a purely technical perspective, I refuse to participate in or contribute to such systems that are built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources. I also don't think they are actually very good for a lot of the applications people seem excited about. Even in cases where LLMs are t…
I remain hopeful that some day someone will train an LLM which is tolerable to people who take this stance (which I respect, much like I respect food vegetarians despite not being one myself). I've been tracking models trained entirely on out-of-copyright data, for example. I've not yet seen one of those which appears generally useful and didn't chuck in a scrape of the web or get fine-tuned on examples generated by…
I suspect that even if you reduced the cost of training or any other real world metric, the goalposts would immediately move. It seems to me that it has never been about those things, but simply about the feeling of superiority one can attain by eschewing something seen as trending.
There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…
> until it is clear and elegant
New grads who spend weeks refactoring code are going to get lapped by new grads who ship something and iterate. There's just a faster feedback loop now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps your vantage point from industry is in fact myopic. We all have our own biases.
Completely fair - but at least my PoV comes from having actually worked as a SWE, you know? I feel like the best understanding this fellow can have is purely secondhand from watching the success / failures of his students. I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice…
I recognize not everyone's work is [as] important, but we should still strive for excellence (and safety.)